It came whispering in broken English
a stutter
a twig tweezed from the small of the back.

He reached to pull the apple from her mouth.

Was it asphyxiation?

Should she have leaned away
and not let her hair slip through the cracks in the book?

Was it just theory?
An inflexible aperture?Nazbas and zero
not to be part of this conversation;
two mirrors reflecting faces waking inside a snow drift?

The beginning is always the argument:
Arrangements, patterns,
Who gets this portion of lamb,
Who gets to speak English as a second language.

Dogs lap rain water on television during conversations of drought.

This first cycle begins with an erosion of memory –
voices within voices pecking eyelids with velvet beaks
one knee down,
the other, filling its veins with damp white earth.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. He is the recipient of the 2000-2001 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a 2006 Whiting Writers' Award and, more recently, a 2008 Tucson Local Genius Award. He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press 2009).